Sundown Harvest
by NoLogique
Summary: Linda, an Imperial Guard commander, and her husband are contacted by the Inquisition for a job that might just be a bit too big for them to handle.
1. Chapter 1

Outside the window is a church, and as I prop my head up to look at its spire, a bit of sunlight slips through the clouds above, and the metal shingles and the effect is, well, quite beautiful.

I get up out of my bed, move across the cramped apartment. Even as the cups on my desk rattle, even as the floor shakes as I reach for the coffee maker, I try to keep the illusion. Outside it looks like a rustic little village, quaint, inviting. And I know that above the roof of this building, a gigantic spiked shuttlecraft is descending again onto the farmfields, incinerating everything in its path.

They're here for me, I think, that or for Linda. She's curled up on the bed, and I smile sheepishly at her. She sits up, pale-skinned, black hair, hand reaching out, ever-searching for a cigarette. She glanced out the window. The little figurines she bought off some natives jiggle along the windowsill, in a dance of their own. They topple into her lap.

"Coffee?" I say.

"Is _that_-" she says, still looking out the window. "Is that what I think it is?"

"That or we're under attack."

"Which would be worse, you think?"

Linda has the military background, not me. She swings out of the bed, stands up, naked, but with perfect military posture. She moves out of the room, and moments later, she's in the bathroom. I sip my coffee.

Outside the window, I can see schoolchildren running. I can't tell if they're excited or terrified, but the schoolmistress charges out of the church, grabs them and pulls them back into the church. Soon, I can see almost the entire town heading for the church. Hiding. This was a good sign, sort of. Is it were some hostile organisms landing down, they'd be heading for the rocks, burning the crops as they go. Hiding in the church meant the government was coming.

Should _I_ hide? I wonder.

Linda comes back into the room, in full uniform -- honestly, she _does_ have a great body, but it's hidden under the grey fatigues, swathed under the greatcoat. She picks up her helmet from beside the bed and turns towards me. "Should you hide?" she asks.

"I don't know," I say. "Depends on who it is, I guess."

My own uniform lies in a shallow grave on a planet light years away from here, crumpled up beside my old sword, which is buried in the throat of one of the inquisitors. I wonder, not for the first time, if there is anyone in this universe whose past isn't at least somewhat violent.

Let's be honest, though, some old habits die hard. My wardrobe is still predominantly white and black. Linda tried to make me wear green once, and it felt like wearing a forest. Nature is still suffocating sometimes, but I'm learning.

I get dressed. The white leather jacket is light. Linda's greatcoat might not look particularly stylish, but the thing has stop a bullet. This spring fare I'm wearing not so much.

Linda is reloading a gun over on the bed. I have no idea where she got it from. Under the bed? I've never seen that gun before in this apartment.

"Well," she says, having finished reloading. She looks up at me and I can't see if she's afraid; her eyes are covered by the black visor of her helmet, like particularly dark sunglasses. "Shall we go meet them?"

It's a short walk out of the village to the farmfields, and as we stride out of the town, I start to feel very exposed. We are the only two figures in town, everyone else locking themselves inside of the church, relying on the inquisition's respect for religion to save them (it wouldn't).

Golden wheat sways ahead of us, until the field terminates into black oblivion where the shuttlecraft burned everything as it touched down. I think the field belongs to Farmer Gerald, who is probably cowering either in his tiny farmhouse or is back in the church with the others.

There are three witch hunters standing outside the black shuttle, tiny figures against its towering spiked spire. I don't recognize any of them, which is a good thing.

Linda salutes and says, "Gentlemen, this is quite the gathering for such an obscure planet. What can we do for you?"

Three of them. Only three of them standing here. Where are the others? Where is their guard? Where are the weapons that should be bearing down on us?

The foremost witch hunter, the tall gaunt one, turns to his friend on the right, takes a sheet of paper from him and reads it, lifting reading glasses up in front of his eyes. "Commander Linda Barry, yes?"

Linda looks both uncomfortable and irked. The witch hunters never follow any sort of military protocol. The Imperial Guard would've handled introductions much more formally. "You are speaking to her, sir. And you gentlemen?"

"And this is your husband," the witch hunter says, glancing up at me. "We don't have his name on file."

"He's a civilian," Linda says, as if that's supposed to end the discussion. "Now, gentlemen, your arrival is interrupting my leave, so if you could--"

"Your _leave_." The witch hunter smirks. "Your finagled _permanent_ leave, yes, I read the documentation on that. You won a bet, it seems, with the commissar Maxwell Find; yes, we remember. Maxwell Find is dead, Commander."

"Doesn't mean his debts die with him."

"Actually, it _does_. But -- ah, don't worry, Commander, we're not here to drag you back into the glorious service of the Emperor. Not entirely."

An uncomfortable silence descends on us all. I'm starting to feel the horrible sensation of being in my element again, which is horrific, since the sensation is coming from being in close proximity with this obsidian death machine and these three zealots.

The witch hunter says, "Commander, I'm not going to force you onto this craft because we require your cooperation in full, and since there are hundreds dead already, I'm not going to jeopardize that if I don't have to. Grimdire, if you please."

The witch hunter on the left steps forward and hands Linda an envelope. "Read that. We'll be here tomorrow."

And just like that, they let us go, and they go back into their ugly ship, while we get to go back to our apartment. Linda says nothing all the way into the village, all the way up the stairs, all the way to our bed.

I sit at the desk and she sits at the bed. Then slowly, she opens the envelope, and takes out a briefing report and a number of photographs.

"Oh god," she says.

The photographs fall out of her hand, hit the floor and scatter. Two of them flitter towards my boot. One of them depicts a tyranid, the photograph thankfully blurry enough so that the twisting mass of insectile flesh isn't entirely clear. The second photograph depicts a woman who looks enough like Linda to be her sister.

I pick them up and look up at Linda, who takes off her helmet, and looks like she wants to throw up into it. "Linda," I say. "Why them? Why the witch hunters?"

"My sister's, uh, a heretic," she says. "Been that way for years. Hiding from them."

"What do you have to do with it?"

Linda shakes her head. "I don't know. I want to go ask them but--"

I know what she means. Somewhere over this planet, in orbit, is one of the flying cathedrals the Empire uses, a wreck of black metal and religious fervor, cluttered with wires and steam. Linda was raised on a planet with trees and water and sky. I think her idea of hell is one of those ships up there.

She looks at the briefing report. "Tyranids," she says.

"Tyranids," I says.

"They've invaded Maze."

"A planet?"

"Trading spot, yeah, in the Ceres system. It's got, uh, it's got a network of tunnels beneath the surface, almost impossible to get around."

"I think we're missing the part about what _you_ have to do with this, unless the inquisition have taken up the duty to telling people their family is in trouble."

"Well, no, that's easy." She sets the report aside and leans back, resting her head against the wall, eyes closed. I want to go take her into my arms, comfort her, but Linda never wants anything like that. She opens her eyes and looks at me. "I know how to get around the tunnels."

"What does the Inquisition care?"

"They want to rescue my sister so they can try her."

"So, essentially--"

"Yeah." She drops her gaze to the floor. "Either she gets torn apart by the bugs, or she's gets tortured by the empire."

"So what do we do?"

"Do you know what tyranids _do_ to people?"

"I do."

"I don't want to get on one of those ships again."

"I know."

She buries her face in her hands, breathes in, breathes out. Then she gets up, and I see she's in military mode, face hardened. "All right," she says. "It's time to resume my command, I think."

"I'm coming with you, you know."

"Right, so you can get recognized, right? And then, oh yeah, and then _you'll_ be taken from me and tortured by the empire."

"Well, that's the thing right? I'm not going to let you just leave and then go get torn apart by tyranids. Not without me."

"You want to fight about this?"

"Yeah. Yeah, this'll be one of those big marriage clashes you read about."

Without a word, she tears the curtain rod down from the window, whips it back, knocking the curtain rings from it and swinging it towards me. I'm already up from my chair, bouncing off the desk. I catch the curtain rod, twist into her momentum.

The two of us go flying through the door.


	2. Chapter 2

I don't know what to say, really. Linda had never told she had a sister before, and it makes me realize just how much some things aren't said between us.

For instance, I've never told her what my earliest memory is. This came up in conversation once, and she told me her earliest memory was of her father chopping down trees. I told her it was in the Mordoch Chapel chamber, clad in white robes, learning my prayers. Every day, there were humans sacrificing their lives and the prayers helped, they said.

That is not my earliest memory, however. My earliest memory doesn't make sense. It's me sitting in the vat where we were grown -- my batch of the inquisitors, I mean -- floating in the embryonic goo, looking about, the feeding tubes in my arms and legs. I remember to the right of me was the thing that was going to become Philip Vaazon, twisting around and looking at me with the too-large eyes all of us had. The vats were lit from the bottom, and each tank was its own glowing egg.

To my right, the creature in the tank was broken. I couldn't understand how exactly, but I saw the way the arms were bent, the milkiness of its eyes, the way its teeth were poking through its cheeks. It looked at me. I think I smiled at it, then. Making friends.

Then a man in a labcoat approached it, looked through it, and did something with the machine beneath the tank. Brown liquid exploded upwards, sending the fetus into oblivion, and then suctioned downwards, until it was gone. I think I screamed, or may have tried to.

I told Linda that the reason I turned on the Inquisition was some high moral stand, a disgust with the Hereticus's candid way with living beings, but I don't think that was it. I think it was just my fear. I'm afraid of the way they could transform a human being, change it from being a living thing into just a lot of bits and chemicals.

And, sitting in that shuttlecraft with the inquisitors, breaking orbit and heading towards the vast hideous thing hanging there in space, that starship, I could feel hat same fear coming upon me again. As soon as we entered that place, we would lose our status as human beings.

We are sitting in a dark room, the ceiling high and arched, ornately, almost exquisitely designed. A stained glass window depicting the emperor beams at us from behind the silhouettes of the three witch hunters. Richard, the gaunt one, the leader, leans forward and says, "When was the last time you were on an imperial ship, Commander?"

Linda doesn't say anything at first. She turns her head, regards him for a second, and says, "A while ago."

"I hope you found it hospitable."

"It was certainly interesting."

After living through so many wars, it's strange to see the void so empty. There are no Orkin ships outside, puttering and falling, blasted to bits by the Imperial weaponry, no Eldar city-states, no whipping meteorites or moons. Just our little planet below and that ugly spiky hunk of metal above.

"I find it sickening that they still call it Maze," the witch hunter Grimdire says. "Our destination, I mean. It used to be a holy land. Those tunnels were catacombs, I believe. Now they're infested with smugglers."

"Not to mention it's soon to be a tyranid breeding ground," Richard says.

I can't take my eyes off the ship above us. It's becoming closer and closer, becoming a horrible inevitability. I feel almost sick.

Linda once told me she used to crew on a ship like that, back early in her career, transporting her from one system to the next. Her captain used to joke about it, calling it practically a leave, these few days his soldiers got to drill about on a ship, rather than enter combat.

She used to sleep beneath coiling wires nestled in a bank of metal, and all night little things would creep along the floor next to the bedding, with circuitry and sensors where their eyes should be, their modified bodies locating dirt and waste and devouring it. She'd toss and turn, the only sounds the roaring of the engine, the gobbling noises from the monsters shuffling around beside her and the chanting of the priests above.

I never saw the lower levels of the ships when I was on one; I stuck mainly to the cathedral, kneeling in the glow of the stained glass.

There is a lurch, and in the glow from the planet outside I see Richard smile. A docking bay door on the side of the ship opens.

"Look at it," Richard says, leaning forwards. "The _Immaculatus_. A breathtaking work of architecture, don't you think?"

An odd thing for a witch hunter to say. His compatriots shift uneasily. To praise the artistry of a ship insinuated that there was an artist human enough for a human to praise. The ships are sacred; the people who built them, whoever they were, are closer to gods in the minds of the religious.

I look at Richard, and I see the way he shifts his gaunt frame so he can get a better look at the ship. He's not just praising it, he's _appraising_ it, letting his gaze run down the contours of its hull, up the elaborate decorations on the spires, along the fluted trellises. I realize I'm in the presence of an artist, an architect; someone who has no business in the Inquisition.

And then, as the glow of our beloved planet is gone from my skin, the mouth of the _Immaculatus _gorges itself on our shuttle.

XXXX

Linda has a fascination with bright colours that comes, I think, from the lack of them in her life. The world of the Imperial Regiment is a world of browns and gunmetal, the brown of the torn earth, the brown of their greatcoats, the brown of their tents, of their torn bodies, of the sky when it's filled with the smoke of the war.

The only colours that came into her life were the colours of the planets she fell onto; the fetid green of their jungles, the yellow heat of their deserts -- only the colours of the places hard enough and monstrous enough to withstand the war. Take green fields and blue skies, add a war, and all you've got is brown, brown, brown.

On our wedding night, she sat in our hotel room in a gown of reds and blues and greens and yellows, and just stared and stared into the aquarium set into the wall, watching the flickering scales on the fish as they turned rainbows in the water.

I had colours aplenty as a child. No sunlight, but bright primary colours glowing out of the black of the cathedral, the red, the blue, the yellow of the stained glass, the green on the armour, the orange of the fire. Shrouded in our prayer robes, we children had lots of colour.

_Chunk. _The sound of the air lock rockets me back to the present, the door opening inwards. Standing there, cigar clenched between his unearthly white teeth, is a Space Marine.

Oh good god, I'd forgotten what they were like.

He's massive. I wonder if the female Space Marines are this big. I wonder if there _are_ female Space Marines. Maybe they're sexless. Maybe they all come out this way, this enlarged caricature of a human being. His neck is gigantic, veins sticking out. I bet his neck could turn a bullet. He grins and his eyes resemble bird's eyes, predatory as hell. Short cropped military grey hair. And, of course, gigantic armour. I'm in the presence of a war machine.

"Howdy," the war machine says. "C'mon in."

"Everything ready then, Captain?" Richard says, stepping past him. "Room all set up?"

"Haven't checked. This place is pretty efficient, though. I'm sure everything's good. Ah, these the newcomers?"

Meaning us. Linda steps out of the air lock and I follow her.

"I'm Captain Clive Baker," the Marine says, shaking Linda's hand and then mine. "Shitty flight up? I hate those shuttles."

We have to clamber over wires and steam-vents to get to the briefing room.

XXXX

"Right," Captain Clive Baker says, resting on the edge of the metal table, looking at the projector ahead of him like its a foreign creature. "Right."

We can screams outside the room, from the torture chambers above us. Richard gets up and closes the door, and silence drains in.

"Okay," Clive says. "We can begin. _We_ are going to Maze."

"Hideous place," Grimdire says, looking at his hands. "Sickening twisted place full of nothing but criminals and drug dealers and homosexuals and-"

"Maze," Richard says. "A team of four operatives, Captain Clive Baker included, myself, Grimdire, and _you_ two."

Meaning us.

"Where are these four operatives?" Linda says, looking uncomfortable.

"Waiting for us on Maze, actually," Richard says, approaching the projector, almost reaching for it, letting his fingers trail along the table.

"Eight of us, then," I say, the first thing I've said since we got off the shuttle. "Maze has been overrun by tyranids -- _why_ are there only eight of us going?"

Grimdire glares at me like no one's glared at me before (and I've been glared at from pros before) and Richard smirks. "We haven't told the populace yet," Richard says.

"We'd like to keep this a secret," Clive says. "Bit of subtlety on our part. The tyranids can _have_ Maze."

"We just want your sister," Richard says.

"I never knew she was so important," Linda says, leaning forwards.

"Well, that's the thing." Richard looks back at the projector, looks at it like it's his lover. "You sister, Commander, was the one who let the tyranids _in_."

I look at Linda, and she looks at me, and I wish that we were instead not here but rather in a supermarket, trailing down the bright aisles, rattling along together with a metal cart, moving like the elderly.

Linda starts to laugh.


	3. Chapter 3

"Let them in?" Linda leans forward, that same weird smile on her face. "What an ambiguous phrase. What exactly does it mean?"

The lights are off now, the projector on. In the flickering beam Captain Clive's head turns into a sea of blackness, a single strip of white light running up his profile. "Through the Thieve's Gate. Let them in through there."

"I don't understand."

On the screen a shaky image of the planet Maze pops up. The planet sinks backwards and its system comes into view around it. Clive regards the image. "Maze is in an odd system, odd for an imperial colony. The planet itself is fairly average; atmosphere mainly composed of nitrogen -- due to the nitro-based plants that make up ninety percent of its vegetation -- those damn shrubs, I mean; I'm sure you remember them, Commander. Not much else grows there. It's got a nice yellow sun here, Balthius IV, sort of nearby. Not really near enough for _my_ tastes -- Maze is a little chilly."

"Seems like an odd place for the tyranids to want," I say, "if it's so cold."

"Sure it _is_ cold on the surface," Linda says, leaning forwards, "but the tunnels are warm."

"Right," Clive says. "Planet _here_, yellow sun _there_ -- did you go out onto the surface much when you were there, Commander?"

"Occasionally."

"Then you'd remember _this_ little anomaly, then; the Hectate star."

"The witch-star, yeah, I remember. Red in the summer, blue in the winter."

"Hectate emits a fluctuating energy/radiation pattern -- it saturates the whole system with it, actually, and the pattern is so strong and so jumpy that it disrupts almost all of our communications equipment and our warp drives. Heck, it almost kills our plasma drives too. The Holy Fleet can't go through the Immaterium to get to Maze. We had to set up a gate."

"Hm."

"Commander?"

"I remember the provincial radio would never work when we were out on the surface."

"Yeah, it knocks most signals right out of the park. _This_ is why smugglers and heretics love hanging around Maze so much. The Imperium can only communicate via a series of placed probes, using short-range waves to and from our own gate."

"It's sort of like the Imperium's biggest blind spot, eh? So why does the Imperium keep the colony around, with all the smugglers, et cetera?"

Grimdire stiffens beside her. I can't see Clive's grin, but it's in his voice: "Maze has a heck of a lot of religious value to the Imperium."

Linda glances at me. I see we both share the same thought: not all is as it seems here.

"So," she says, "the tyranids came through the gate, then. But surely you need military access codes for that."

"There are two gates." Clive points to a blank spot on the map. "The Thieve's Gate _may_ be here. Last time we checked it was. It's the gate the smugglers set up for their own travel. We can't find it because of Hectate's field, and because it keeps changing position."

"Plasma drives on a gate?"

Richard chuckles. "No," he says, "just ordinary thrusters. Criminals are notoriously resourceful."

Clive nods. "Your sister knew the access codes for the Thieve's Gate."

"I don't get it," Linda says. "First, what the _hell_ would she gain through letting the tyranids invade Maze? It has zero tactical value from what I'm hearing and the tyranids are _not_ ideal allies. She lets them in, they eat everyone. What's to gain for her? Not to mention how does the Imperium know _she_ did it?"

No one says anything.

Linda looks around. "There _are_ reasons, isn't there? But you're not going to tell me, are you?"

"Let's call it a state secret," Richard says. "We just need your help getting through the tunnels to find her."

Linda leans back in her chair. I wonder what she's feeling -- that's my wife, emotionally unfathomable.

She shifts in her seat. "How do you know she's even still alive?"

Richard exchanges a look with Grimdire, then with Clive.

"State secret?" the marine asks.

"No," Richard says. "I think we can show her."

Clive taps the projector. It shifts to a photograph, and I suck in my breath. At first I'm not entirely sure what I'm looking at. It's like my brain is trying not to process it.

"We only recovered _one_ of our short-range probes," Richard says. "It had a wealth of information on it, let me tell you."

Tyranids shouldn't do this. They're genetically engineered devourers of life. They are walking consumption, swarming masses of hunger.

"What you're looking at," Richard says, "is a strain of tyranid known as the Red Terror."

It's twisting, a red carapace peeling back to reveal shifting bone, or exoskeleton, or _something_. Its mouth is a series of teeth, and its only limbs are weapons, sheer blades sticking out from its crimson shimmering skin. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.

One of its blades is coming down, gently _caressing_ a woman's skin. She is not naked, but not far from it. She doesn't look scared. She looks trusting.

"_That_," Linda says, "doesn't make sense."

Richard chuckles. "Yes I know. Tyranids do not communicate with non-tyranids, this is something we _know_. There are a series of images like this. Your sister is in bed with the species."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Oh goodness, then I guess it didn't happen. Let's turn this starship around and return you and your husband to your apartment on your little planet. My mistake. Clive, roll the video please."

I almost ask him not to. I'm rooted to the spot as the space marine taps the projector. A grainy video plays. Something comes into view, something with lots and lots of teeth. "That's not-"

"Old One-Eye?" Richard asks. "No, I don't think so. Something similar perhaps?"

The thing with so much teeth vanishes and a woman's face comes into view. She says, "We don't want the emperor dead, do we?"

Hissing sounds. My skin starts to crawl.

"We want to _eat_ him. We want to devour him. We want to consume his flesh."

Something swarms into view, a centipedal limb unfurls out towards the camera, and the video stops. I realize that my nails are digging into my palms.

"Good god," I say. Linda glances at me.

"Tell me," she says. She raps her fingers on the table. "If there are tyranids on Maze, where are these operatives we're to meet up with?"

Richard smirks. "I like to think humans aren't entirely screwed when it comes to the Great Mutation Invasion. Clive? How much time do we have until we reach the gate?"

Clive shrugs. "Half an hour?"

"Half an hour?" Linda says. "I never wanted to be eaten alive. Shot, cut, maybe, but not devoured."

"Best say some prayers then," Richard says. He chuckles and gets up and walks out of the room -- door opens, we hear screams, door closes.

Half an hour later, we're standing in front of a stained glass window, wires hanging around us, watching the vast interstellar gate looming towards us.

"I don't like tyranids," Linda whispers to me, checking her guns.

"They're not so bad. I used to have a pet Carnifex. He'd run around and lick my face and fetch sticks."

"You're kidding."

"Of course I'm kidding. The Inquisition never let me have pets."

She smirks, but I see that she's pale. Pinched, even. She's good at hiding fear, so I figure this is hitting her harder than I thought. I kneel down. "It's going to be okay."

"Easy for you to say. You don't have emotions."

I don't say anything. I know she's not meaning what she's saying. She's upset. I touch her hand.

"I should never have gotten married," she says.

She sees the look on my face and grabs my hand. "No," she hisses, "no, I didn't mean that. I'm just so scared. I just--" She presses the back of my hand to her lips. "Don't want to lose you."

"You won't."

"All they do is eat people. That's all they do."

"They won't eat me."

She's still clutching my hand as the ship enters the gate and the world floods with light around us.


End file.
